Is Freezing an Endothermic or Exothermic Reaction?


If heat is removed from the water vapor, the gas removes heat, cools, and condenses back into liquid water. As time passes and the temperature of the water decreases, the gas molecules (water vapor) around this glass slow down and change from gaseous to liquid as they accumulate on the surface of the glass. In this process, the water releases heat to the environment, so it is an exothermic process.

Freezing is a process that arises from exothermic conditions. However, freezing is a physical change, so it does not represent an exothermic chemical reaction. Nor does freezing give off heat. Instead, heat is lost, and freezing follows the heat loss without causing it.

You can then see that as the refrigerant (nitrogen, dry ice, etc.) takes energy from the water, the temperature drops to 0°C, stays there for a while while the water freezes, and then starts to drop again. As long as the thermometer stops at 0°C, the frozen water continues to radiate energy, as evidenced by the constantly evaporating dry ice or liquid nitrogen.

This lowers the freezing point, making the water less “happy” to be a liquid, so it dissolves faster. Not only does this change the time it takes for ice to form, but it actually prevents the ice from forming fully unless the temperature gets so low that it freezes even with salt water.

What Happens When Water Is Heated

Also, once you put your hot drink in the water, the water heats up as the drink cools, so you have to wait for the ice to melt for the water to cool down again. The melting of ice is an endothermic process because heat must be provided to allow the molecules to break through the hydrogen bonds and start moving again. The melting of ice is an endothermic process, meaning that ice takes thermal energy from its environment to change its state from solid to liquid.

When water changes from a liquid phase (i.e. water) to a solid phase (i.e. ice), this process is known as freezing. When water gives off heat to the environment, its temperature drops to the freezing point and ice forms. To turn liquid water into ice, you need to place the water in a cold environment so that the heat leaves the water.

Therefore, the freezing of water is an exothermic process as heat is removed from the system. In fact, heat must be constantly removed from the freezing water, otherwise the freezing process will stop.

Boiling Water Informs Us of Obvious Things

Our experience makes it easy for us to understand that it takes heat to boil water or any liquid and then turn it into a gas, and the process is endothermic. Less intuitively, when a gas condenses into a liquid, heat is released and the process is exothermic. If you know that a heat input (endothermic) is required from a solid to a liquid and a gas, then you know that the transition from a gas to a liquid and a solid requires heat to be removed (exothermic).

Melting, evaporation and sublimation are endothermic processes; they occur only when heat is absorbed. Because we need to add heat, boiling water is what chemists call endothermic. Like other types of reactions, thermal energy can be released or absorbed when a material dissolves. Exothermic reactions release energy (in the form of heat) into the environment.

These reactions can help us heat up by releasing energy (exothermic) or help us cool down by absorbing energy (endothermic). Whether a reaction is endothermic or exothermic depends on the difference between the energy required to break a bond and the energy released when a new bond is formed.

To determine whether a reaction is exothermic or endothermic, you need to compare the energy required to break the reactant bonds to the energy released when new bonds are formed. As can be seen from the above figure, the energy level of the exothermic reaction product is lower than that of the reactants.

Water Becomes Gaseous When It Gains Heat

For example, when water changes from liquid to gas, ΔH is positive; the water becomes hot. All these changes in the aqueous phase are accompanied by the supply or removal of heat, so they are endothermic or exothermic reactions.

Phase transitions associated with the formation of intermolecular attraction (i.e., freezing, condensation, and precipitation) release energy as the particles assume a lower energy conformation. For example, the transformation of a liquid, in which the molecules are close together, into a gas, in which the molecules are on average distant from each other, requires the supply of energy (heat) to provide the molecules with sufficient kinetic energy so that they can overcome the forces of intermolecular attraction.

Therefore, more polar molecules generally require more energy to overcome the intermolecular attraction during the endothermic phase transition and release more energy through the formation of intermolecular attraction during the exothermic phase transition.

In general, the greater the change in phase transition enthalpy (the more heat required for an endothermic transition or released for an exothermic transition), the higher the temperature at which a substance undergoes a phase transition.

The enthalpy of vaporization of a given substance is much greater than its enthalpy of fusion, because it takes more energy to completely separate the molecules (liquid-to-gas) than just to allow them to move freely relative to each other (solid-to-liquid). ). This energy breaks the rigid bonds in the ice and causes the water molecules to move faster and collide more often.

Melting Is an Endothermic Process

Essentially, the melting of ice is an endothermic reaction because the ice absorbs energy (heat) which causes a change. In essence, the physical process of melting is endothermic, since it takes energy to turn a solid into a liquid. The melting process requires heat to flow and takes it from the hot water. Keep cooling the water (removing heat) and it becomes solid ice.

It is important to remember that vaporization is an endothermic process because heat is removed from the liquid when it boils. Freezing, the transition from liquid to solid, is an exothermic process because energy is released in the form of heat. Since freezing/melting is a first-order phase transition, latent heat participates in this transition.

The absorbed heat begins to destroy the intermolecular attraction of liquid freon, providing an endothermic evaporation process. When these molecules condense again to form liquid water, the energy entering the system must be released. Water molecules, losing energy, begin to move slowly, approach each other and compact enough to turn into ice.

In the presence of water, a strong acid rapidly dissociates and releases heat, so this is an exothermic reaction. In thermodynamics, chemical reactions can be divided into endothermic and exothermic. Respiration is a series of exothermic reactions that occur in the mitochondria of living cells to release energy from food molecules.

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